Crime Story, Part Two: Connections

December 7, 2007

One of the reasons I created my website is to promote the idea of methodical, granular scholarship in the field of television history and commentary, which too often seems to operate only on a popular (read: ignorant or lazy) plane. What I’ve written in the previous post are some not terribly original generalizations about Crime Story.It would probably be more useful for me to focus on the primary texts, which, in the case of TV episodes, are always the on-screen credits.If you write about television, you need a good eye for all those names and a good memory for what they mean.

Case in point: I’ve written a lot about “Michael Mann” in the last post.That’s a kind of shorthand that would be irresponsible without further clarification.Mann was the executive producer of Crime Story, but the show was created by two writers named Chuck Adamson and Gustave Reininger.Reininger was a former stockbroker with few credits when his spec script caught Mann’s attention.Adamson was a veteran Chicago cop, and some of the material in Crime Story is said to have been based on his own police career.Both, in other words, were Mann proteges.And when one considers that the actor playing Torello, the character based on Adamson, was also a former Chicago cop plucked from obscurity by Mann (for a role in his debut film, Thief), one begins to see how a producer with vision can shape the world of a television series without actually being the person who has created or even written most of the material.

Sometimes sorting through the names in a show’s credits can lead to the wrong conclusions.For instance, the incidental music for Crime Story was composed by Todd Rundgren (for a number of the early episodes) and Al Kooper.From that one would surmise that, certainly, Michael Mann’s taste in music is hip, since Rundgren was one of the most talented rock/pop producer/singer/songwriters of the seventies, and Kooper is a legendary session musician who played with Dylan and produced early Blood, Sweat and Tears and Lynyrd Skynyrd albums.One might also assume that Crime Story’s original music is terrific, but that’s not the case, at least to my ears; it’s awfully generic, neither richly sixties-period nor committedly eighties-synthesizer in the manner for which Mann’s films of the time are famous.Kooper also served as the series’ music supervisor, which means that he was – as the jokey credits for the clip show episode, “Crime Pays,” identify him – the “Guy Who Picks the Songs For the Show.”In that capacity, Kooper excelled, for the pop tunes that underscore many scenes are indeed well-chosen.At least, I think they are – there are contradictory reports from fans circulating that Anchor Bay, which released the DVDs which contain the only version of Crime Story I’ve seen, may or may not have replaced some of the songs with stock music.So it’s possible that I’m criticizing Rundgren and Kooper for something that might not represent their work at all.

One of the things that surprised me, but shouldn’t have, as I was watching Crime Story is that despite the show’s ready availability and relatively recent vintage, its writing and directing credits are not accurately documented anywhere on the many internet sites devoted to movies and TV shows.So I will reproduce them here:

Of course, the writing (and even the directing) credits of a television series don’t always represent who really did what behind the scenes, but they’re the essential starting point in trying to sort the creative contributions of the people involved.To judge by their plenitude of story credits, Adamson (also credited as executive story editor) and Reininger mapped out the basic plotting of the series, with contributions from Mann and story editor David J. Burke (who was replaced by Robert Eisele late in the season).Then the teleplays were farmed out, at least in part, to be fleshed out by freelancers who appear to have been hired for two or three episodes apiece.

Some of those freelancers deserve further comment.The first name that jumps out is Carlton Cuse, who is now, as one of the showrunners for Lost, one of the hottest TV writer-producers in Hollywood.His writing partner on Crime Story, Tony Castro, is a fascinating figure in a different sort of way, a journalist, Angeleno scenester, and eventual ex-con, exactly the sort of larger-than-life character who repeatedly turns up in Mann’s circle. And I’m delighted that Castro’s foray into TV writing remains obscure enough that, as of this writing, he doesn’t appear to have an IMDb entry.

(Another important personage along these lines from Crime Story is actor John Santucci, who plays Luca’s wheedling sidekick Pauli Taglia.Santucci was a real-life Chicago safecracker and small-time mafioso who was the basis for James Caan’s character in Thief.His bug-eyed, psychotic stare is a key visual element of Crime Story, and probably an influence on the cartoonish, semi-comic secondary mobster characters of David Chase’s The Sopranos.But I think Mann’s obvious infatuation with Santucci turns into a major flaw, as the double-dealing Taglia’s ability to survive Luca’s wrath despite his obvious treachery becomes ever more hard to accept, especially in the ludicrous, slap-in-the-audience’s-face season finale.)

Among the series’ other writers, it’s worth noting how many appear to have gone on to major careers in television after scoring early credits, if not their very first TV assignments, on Crime Story: Eric Blakeney (21 Jump Street), Peter Lance (Wiseguy), Clifton Campbell (Profiler), my fellow Raleigh native David J. Burke (SeaQuest DSV), and Cuse.There were others with more experience (Richard Danus, for example, had co-written Xanadu) but Mann, very much an outsider working within the system, had the confidence to staff his show almost entirely with newcomers.

Crime Story’s directors were a more seasoned lot of rank-and-file episodic veterans, although even there one sees some odd choices.Gary Sinise, then a major actor/director in Chicago’s Steppenwolf theatre company, would have been a known quantity to Mann but a total nobody in Hollywood when he played a big guest role in one episode and then returned to make his debut behind the camera on the pivotal “Torello on Trial” episode (which engineered the move from Chicago to Las Vegas).An even more left-field candidate was Leon Ichaso, the Cuban independant filmmaker who helmed the first four segments following the pilot; Ichaso came full circle within the Mann realm decades later when he directed Pinero (2001), a biopic about the self-destructive playwright Miguel Pinero, another outsider figure whose biggest flirtation with the mainstream was a writing/acting stint on Miami Vice.

Finally, I want to comment on an episode that stands out a bit from the others, “Abrams For the Defense.”It was the first to center around David Abrams (Stephen Lang), a liberal defense attorney who at first seemed altogether tangential to the main thrust of the show (although eventually it became clear that the writers were positioning him as a crusading anti-mafia prosecutor).I’ll bet the show’s diehard fans hate this episode, because it largely ignores the mob storylines.Instead, the story is about Abrams’ defense of an angry black man (Ving Rhames) who punches out his criminally negligent slumlord.At the risk of seeming completely obsessed with the sixties social drama East Side / West Side, I’m going to posit a theory here: that “Abrams For the Defense” is an intentional homage to the most famous episode of that earlier series, “Who Do You Kill?”

Both shows open with a scene in which a tenement child is bitten by a rat, and both chart the various abuses the child’s parents suffer afterward at the hands of an implicitly racist bureaucracy.In “Who Do You Kill?” the baby dies but the show still ends on a note of very fragile hope.“Abrams For the Defense” spares the child’s life but ups the ante on despair, appending a grim fate for Rhames’ character just when it seems that Abrams and his white liberal friends (including the cops) have made a positive difference in his life.It’s as if someone behind Crime Story remembered how grim and uncompromising East Side / West Side had been and thought, “Well, I can top that!”

And here’s a corollary to my theory.The teleplay for “Abrams For the Defense” is credited in part to one Kenneth Michael Edwards.Edwards is the only writer from Crime Story’s first season for whom I can find no other credits on the internet, and who isn’t listed in the Writers Guild of America’s online database (at least not with that middle initial).Michael Mann’s middle name is Kenneth.I’m going to speculate, then, that “Kenneth Michael Edwards” could be a pseudonym of Mann’s, and that “Abrams For the Defense” is specifically his tribute to East Side / West Side.

Mann was twenty when East Side debuted in 1963, old enough to have seen it during his formative creative years – and 1963 is the year in which Crime Story is set.Was Mann a fan of East Side / West Side?Is there some connective tissue between Neil Brock’s growly broken-nosed swaggering masculinity and Mike Torello’s suave broken-nosed swaggering masculinity?If my guess is correct, that would make the atypical “Abrams For the Defense” the only Crime Story segment for which Mann is the primary writer, and therefore a key episode in his canon alongside the only one Mann directed, the climactic “Top of the World.”(Why would Mann use an alias for the teleplay and his own name for the story credit?I have no idea.)

2 Responses to “Crime Story, Part Two: Connections”

Stephen, As one of the writers of the last two episodes of the first season of Crime Story and a story editor/writer on the second season, writing that year’s season opener “The Senator, The Showgirl and The Mob,” Kevin Spacey’s television debut, I want to thank you for doing such a brilliant homage to Crime Story — a series that was a decade and a half ahead of it’s time.

In addition to continuing to produce episodic drama, I returned to investigative journalism post 9/11 and I’ve written three non fiction books on the failure of the FBI in the years leading up to the September 11th attacks. They’re listed on my website: http://www.peterlance.com

Anyway, for a fan who came to the series in DVD I can tell you that you did an amazing job of capturing the essence of Michael Mann’s genius. The only note I would add is that as much as any other figure, this was Chuck Adamson’s show — based directly on his life and times as portrayed so well by Dennis Farina.

It was a magical time in episodic television — a time when the network and the studio (New World) pretty much let Michael alone to realize his vision. I feel privileged to have been apart of it and to have Michael himself direct the first episode that I ever wrote.

Peter Lance, detail-obsessed as any good writer should be, adds a couple of corrections via a follow-up e-mail: that Kevin Spacey’s CRIME STORY episode was actually titled “The Senator, The Movie Star, and The Mob,” and that it wasn’t quite Spacey’s TV debut. He also points out that his TV credits extend well beyond the single one I listed above for the sake of brevity, namely to the penultimate season of MIAMI VICE and to WISEGUY, on which he was a showrunner. (I’ve never seen WISEGUY, but I know it has some devoted fans.)